Unwinding M51

Posted on April 7, 2024  •  1 minutes  • 152 words

图文来源自：nasa. copyright: Hubble Heritage Project

The arms of a grand design spiral galaxy 60,000 light-years across areunwound in this digital transformation of the magnificent 2005.In fact, M51 is one of the original spiral nebulae, its windingarms described by a mathematical curve known as a, a spiral whose separation grows in away with increasing distance from the center.Applying logarithms to shift the pixelcoordinates in the Hubble image relative to the center of M51 mapsthe galaxy’s spiral arms into diagonal straight lines.The transformed image dramatically shows the arms themselves aretraced by star formation, lined with pinkish starformingregions and young blue star clusters.Companion galaxy NGC 5195 (top) seems to alter the track of the arm infront of it though, and itself remains relatively unaffected by thisunwinding of M51.Also known as the,logarthimic spirals can be found in nature on all scales.For example, logarithmic spirals can also describe, the tracks of subatomic particles in aand, of course,.